Welcome to Windows 7 Forums. Our forum is dedicated to helping you find support and solutions for any problems regarding your Windows 7 PC be it Dell, HP, Acer, Asus or a custom build. We also provide an extensive Windows 7 tutorial section that covers a wide range of tips and tricks.

Windows 7: Hard Drive - why is 2 TB only 1.8 TB ??

The advertised 2 TB only shows up as 1.8 TB, and so keeping it below the 80-90 percent full means it is pretty much "full" at about 1.5 TB.

Ditto my 1 TB, which shows up as 900 MB, and my 1.5 TB which shows up as 1.3 TB.

So the questions:
- why do they advertise as 2 TB when its only 90 percent of that ?
- am i doing the right thing by keeping the drives below about 80-90 percent of the 1.8 TB max capacity ?

- OR -

- do i really have a full 2 TB capacity, and its just formatted to display "full" at the 90% point of 2 TB, which is 1.8 TB (in other words i can safely store up to a full 1.8 TB point, rather than 80-90 percent of THAT).......

The advertised 2 TB only shows up as 1.8 TB, and so keeping it below the 80-90 percent full means it is pretty much "full" at about 1.5 TB.

Ditto my 1 TB, which shows up as 900 MB, and my 1.5 TB which shows up as 1.3 TB.

So the questions:
- why do they advertise as 2 TB when its only 90 percent of that ?
- am i doing the right thing by keeping the drives below about 80-90 percent of the 1.8 TB max capacity ?

- OR -

- do i really have a full 2 TB capacity, and its just formatted to display "full" at the 90% point of 2 TB, which is 1.8 TB (in other words i can safely store up to a full 1.8 TB point, rather than 80-90 percent of THAT).......

The advertised 2 TB only shows up as 1.8 TB, and so keeping it below the 80-90 percent full means it is pretty much "full" at about 1.5 TB.

Ditto my 1 TB, which shows up as 900 MB, and my 1.5 TB which shows up as 1.3 TB.

So the questions:
- why do they advertise as 2 TB when its only 90 percent of that ?
- am i doing the right thing by keeping the drives below about 80-90 percent of the 1.8 TB max capacity ?

- OR -

- do i really have a full 2 TB capacity, and its just formatted to display "full" at the 90% point of 2 TB, which is 1.8 TB (in other words i can safely store up to a full 1.8 TB point, rather than 80-90 percent of THAT).......

thanks guys, i'll look forward to the reply,

jm

Jm Hi and welcome

Drives have bad sectors. All of them do. Some mfrs will let drives out with 5% bad some 12%. It is a fact of life. Your 1TB-10% bad sectors=~900 Mb.

When they are manufactured the bad sectors are marked so no data can be written there, and are then useless.

Because it is advertising trick. The actual size of 2TB hard drive is 2,000,000,000,000 bytes (yeah, 2 million millions), which roughly converts into 1.8ish TB. Same goes for every hard drive.

It is not a trick. It is a matter of mathematics. The advertised number is decimal but the system shows a binary number which is 7% less in the GB range and about 10% less in the TB range. But both numbers reflect the same number of bytes. It all has to do with the fact that 1K is 1000 bytes in decimal but 1024 bytes in binary.

Thank you. I get tired of reading about this year after year as if it's one shady manufacturer doing it and taking advantage of customers.

To the OP: I'm not irritated that you didn't understand this...it's just the people who report that it's intentional misleading through advertising. It's just the way it is. It's easier to simplify for humans.

Hard Drive - why is 2 TB only 1.8 TB ??

Cloning a hard drive partition onto a smaller hard driveI have an old 320GB hard drive that's dying and slowing my computer down. The OS is on a 20GB partition. I want to copy that partition onto an empty, 110GB hard drive.
Will the data copied be corrupted? am I better off re-installing windows?
How can I do this?

General Discussion

hard drive failed, system image not found on hard drivehi all,
i hope someone can help me out, i am a newbie to all this so bare with me.
my hard drive failed over a month ago but i managed to do a system image with win7 to my new 2tb internal hard drive. i cannot get the image recovery to work as i says "no image can be found on hard disk". i am at...

Internal Hard Drive acting like an External Hard DriveHi guys,
I'm new on any sort of forums so go easy if it's a stupid question..but here goes.
Me and my brother built me a new computer from scratch (he did the building - i did the watching).
To cut a long story short - I purchased an internal hard drive from Overclockers UK. It's a Samsung...

Hardware & Devices

How do I transfer files from bad sata hard drive to new hard driveHi. I have a virus infected sata hard drive with windows 7 on it. It has the win 7 anti virus 2012 on it, and it's a cybercriminal virus. I have lots of files I want to transfer to the new sata drive. I already have windows 7 installed on the new drive. How do I get the files from the bad drive to...

Installation & Setup

Computer Not Booting Hard Drive/Unresponsive Hard DriveHey guys,
I have a HP Touchsmart IQ500. Turning my computer PC on today, all I got was a blue HP invent screen with setup, boot menu, system recovery, and system diagnosis, and I could not get past it.
I entered the BIOS and figured out that the hard drive was listed as "not installed."...